Barry Pierce's Reviews > Ulysses

How do you read Ulysses? Well you begin on page one and you read all the words until it's finished.

Or, you can just be Irish.

I think that's the secret.

I've just finished Ulysses for the second time and I cannot recall any other book that's just as fun as Ulysses is. People will often call the novel difficult and challenging but that's a reading I just cannot abide by. I don't find Ulysses to be a particularly difficult novel to read. I actually struggle a lot more with other modernist writers, specifically Woolf and Lawrence. The two times I've read Ulysses I've done it quicker than it took me to get through Lady Chatterley's Lover.

So I began questioning myself as to why this is. And I think the answers lays within who I actually am. I'm Irish.

Joyce once said that if Dublin were to one day suddenly disappear from the Earth it could be entirely reconstructed from his book. And it is true that Joyce takes great pleasure in describing almost every step that Bloom takes. But then I think how, if you don't have a fairly solid familiarity with the streets of Dublin, not many of Bloom's journeys make sense.
So, say that Bloom walks along Grafton Street from the Trinity side and goes left along Duke St., onto Dawson St., goes up to Molesworth St. and finds himself outside the Dail on Kildare St. To Joyce, and myself, that journey makes perfect sense in our heads and we can easily follow it because we both have walked that exact route many times. However, to someone who doesn't know Dublin, literally none of that made any sense. All of Ulysses is like this.

Another example would be one of the many moments in the novel that made me audibly laugh. It's during the Circe episode which is this massive hallucination sequence that's written in play form. At one point the sound of a waterfall is heard and Joyce records its noise like this:

The waterfall: Poulaphouca Poulaphouca Poulaphouca Poulaphouca.

Get it? What? You mean you don't have a knowledge of the waterfalls of Ireland? Once again, all of Ulysses is like this.

So why do I get all the references? Why do I find this novel so funny? Why didn't I want it to end and will likely read it again and again for my whole life? Am I so intellectually above all of you that only I, the great Barry, could understand all of Ulysses? No. It's cos I'm Irish.

If you flick through an annotated edition of Ulysses you'll notice all the footnotes are simply just explaining the references. They're full of little explainers of who Michael Davitt was or Arthur Griffith or Charles Stewart Parnell. What a crubeen is and what's double X. What the Phoenix Park murders were and who the croppy boy is. Notes of which I need none, because I know all this, because I'm Irish.

Ulysses is an Irish novel written by an Irish man for Irish people. Joyce steeped the whole thing in such Irishness that many of the dialects, the turns of phrase, the references, and the places make little sense to non-Irish people. The non-Irish in turn have to purchase massive annotated editions and reference guides in order to slowly trudge their way through the pages that Irish people wouldn't even have to pause on. It's from these non-Irish that we always hear that Ulysses is the most difficult novel.

So if you aren't Irish and you tried to conquer Ulysses and you couldn't, don't feel bad, the book wasn't written for you. However, for us Irish, for whom Ulysses is our plaything, we'll keep holding it to our hearts forever.